poet, illustrator, playwright, composer, lyricist

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Breadlines Haunted By Depression Era Ghosts & Goblins

I have lived through many rigid times in America. Over the centuries, I have witnessed some awfully strange and fantastic trials surrounding our cultural composition. Especially during the Crash of 1929, preceding the Great Depression.

It is a dreadfully sad affair when you see your neighbors forced to move out of their lovely homes to bed down with friends and family; people desperately consolidating their lives to compensate for a quick n’ crumbling economy. It is frightening too because you fear the shadow of poverty and despair might envelope you next. It might tap you on the shoulder and whisper in your ear, “This way, please.”

Nothing was more peculiar, however, than to observe some of the ghosts and goblins on my block scrambling to readjust to this unanticipated human condition. Spirits were now aimlessly wandering the streets, haunting the alleyways and breadlines because their dwellings were now vacant of human beings. During these hauntingly needy times, not only the living suffered but also all the dead.

During this depression I was fortunate enough to find work on the college lecture circuit, regarding my book The Vampire – Allegory & Accuracy. Alas this only fascinated a small band of adolescent bloodsuckers calling themselves The Brood. This ragtag band of kids loved my observations, surprised by the exactness of my dissertations, and subsequently they followed me throughout the countryside. They too were falling on hard times, you see, because the wealth they amassed usually came from their affluent victims, and of late, they were as penniless as all.

Never the less, The Brood decided to create a community that, for better or for worse, feed off each other. They were, now more than ever, oddly particular in whom they let in to their tight-knit crimson tribe. It was no longer sufficient to randomly pick victims based on their stature. Now they had to assess the quality of their character as well. The Brood was morally evolving, no longer collecting monetarily but spiritually for the first time in their blood-sucking lives.

This was truly an optimistic outcome to a contemporary national crises, one that not only augmented the quality of their tribe overall, but allowed me to join them in their cause. Which I did immediately: it was inevitable; pulling together in a spiritual equality is why we survived into the next millennium–end of story.

An likewise, with today’s re-Depression looming, forcing all of us to reexamine our dependency on affluence and credit card misapprehensions, it is time to seek spiritual companionship with one another once again. Since we should never judge a person by the size of their wallet, for in these coarse times that mindset will certainly leave you, like the spirits were, wandering the streets alone. Yet the principle that we finally come together based on the quality of our hearts and not our bank accounts is a positive consequence of simply “losing it all”. And so it is my kreepy friends, dust t’dust. For you can’t take it with you in the end. For even the dead know this for certain.